Enabling the Business of Agriculture presents indicators that measure the laws, regulations and bureaucratic processes that affect farmers in 101 countries. The eight core indicators are: supplying seed, registering fertilizer, securing water, registering machinery, sustaining livestock, protecting plant health, trading food and accessing finance.
The project collects data through questionnaires. Indicator-specific experts in each country fill out questionnaires, sharing their knowledge of relevant regulatory frameworks and administrative processes. These specialists are identified through desk research as well as through collaboration with the World Bank Group’s agriculture experts. For this report, questionnaires were administered to more than 4,000 respondents from law firms, private businesses, government agencies, nonprofit organizations and universities. In addition to the questionnaires, the team engaged with agriculture experts in several rounds of interaction by email, conference calls and in-person meetings. The team visited eight countries to verify the data and observe regulatory processes on the ground. Detailed information about the local experts who contributed to this year’s study is available on the Stakeholders page of this website.
Once the data are collected, the team analyzes the information in conjunction with publicly available data on agency websites as well as texts of relevant laws and regulations in force as of June 30, 2018.
To allow for cross-country comparability, the team collects data in a standardized way. A universal set of assumptions about a domestic farmer growing crops and cattle was applied as follows:
In addition, each indicator employs several specific assumptions about the type of seed used by farmers, their water uses, and so on.
Enabling the Business of Agriculture presents indicator scores that aggregate individual data points to benchmark countries against regulatory good practices that affect farmers. The indicator scores track a country’s absolute performance level and can be used to track improvements over time. Calculating the indicator score for each country involves two main steps:
• First, individual components are normalized to a common unit where each component (y) is rescaled using linear transformation (worst–y)/(worst–best). For legal components, the best performance is set at the highest possible score, even if no country currently obtains that score. The worst performance score is the worst value recorded. For efficiency components, the best performance is set by the highest performing country and a score of 0 is assigned in cases of “no practice”. To mitigate the effects of extreme outliers in the distributions of the rescaled data for efficiency components, the worst performance is calculated after the removal of outliers. The definition of outliers is based on the distribution for each component. To simplify the process, the 95th percentile is used for the components with the most dispersed distributions (including the time and cost). No outlier is removed for legal component scores.
• In the second step, component scores are aggregated through simple averaging to obtain one indicator score. All the component scores are equally weighted. A country’s indicator score ranges from 0 to 100, where 0 represents the worst performance and 100 represents the best performance. The difference between a country’s indicator score between report years illustrates the extent to which the country has improved over time.
The supplying seed indicator measures laws and regulations that support the timely release of seed for use by domestic farmers. This indicator includes: (a) the time it takes to register a new variety, (b) the cost of registering a new variety, and (c) nine legal data points assessing good practices that promote transparency and efficiency of variety release processes. For each legal data point, a score of 1 is assigned if the answer is “yes,” and a score of 0 is assigned if the answer is “no.” The aggregate indicator is a simple average of the scores of its three components, with higher values indicating better support for farmers to access high-quality seed.
| Data point | Scoring |
|---|---|
| a) Time to register a new cereal variety | Calendar days |
| b) Cost to register a new cereal variety | Percent of income per capita |
| c) Quality of seed regulation index | Sum of sub-questions |
If a variety is already registered in another country, does the law allow it to be automatically approved for commercialization? | 1/0 |
Are distinctiveness, uniformity and stability (DUS) testing data from foreign authorities accepted? | 1/0 |
In practice, does the variety release committee (VRC) meet on demand or at least once per growing season? | 1/0 |
Is there a catalogue listing registered varieties? | 1/0 |
Is the variety catalogue updated at least once per growing season? | 1/0 |
Can private seed companies or third parties produce "early generation seed" from public varieties? | 1/0 |
Can private seed companies or third parties (for example, private laboratories) certify seed? | 1/0 |
Does the national seed authority publish a fee schedule for seed certification costs? | 1/0 |
Does the law prescribe the procedural requirements to access plant genetic materials in your country? | 1/0 |
Information for the supplying seed indicator is collected through a questionnaire administered to seed companies, national seed associations, government authorities and academics. The information collected is validated through detailed desk reviews of the relevant laws and regulations in each country.
The supplying seed indicator relies on several assumptions about the cereal variety, namely:
Time
Time is recorded in calendar days and captures the median duration of each procedure. The time span for each procedure starts with the first filing of the registration application and ends with the last procedure required to release the variety on the market, which is often the listing in the national catalogue or its publication in the official gazette. Tests that the applicant performs prior to completing an application are excluded. The minimum time for each procedure is one day. Although procedures may take place simultaneously, they cannot start on the same day (that is, simultaneous procedures start on consecutive days). The time spans for the distinctiveness, uniformity and stability (DUS) testing and value for cultivation and use (VCU) testing are standardized according to the number of cropping seasons in a given country, and the minimum number of seasons during which each test must be performed.
For countries with one cropping season per year:
For countries with two cropping seasons per year:
Cost
Only official costs are recorded, including any applicable fees and taxes. In the absence of official fee schedules, the estimates provided by expert respondents are recorded and the median of the responses is taken. Professional fees (for example, notary fees) are only included if the applicant is required to use such services. All costs are recorded as percent of income per capita (using current US dollars).
Countries with no practice or no score
A country is considered “no practice” on the time and cost components if either no seed variety was registered by the private sector between July 1, 2016 and June 30, 2018, or if seed registration legislation is not yet in force or implemented. A score of 0 is recorded if a variety registration is not done in practice. Countries where government oversight of seed performance trials is not instituted but where the industry or third parties successfully undertake this function (for example, Australia, United States) are not scored.
